Diva Rising

ACTRESS-SINGER AUDRA McDONALD'S NEXT ACT

If, by some miracle of miscegenation, Leontyne Price and Ethel Merman had had a love child, the resultant genre-rattling progeny would have resembled the Juilliard-traincd three-time Tony winner Audra McDonald. Those of us lucky enough to have seen McDonald's opening-night performance in Terrence McNally's Master Class realized we were coming as close as a modern theatergoer was ever going to get to witnessing both Price's debut in Aida and Merman's first performance of "Rose's Turn" in Gypsy. A hint of this hybrid, bristling grace so inherent in McDonald's work was first seen by the faculty judges at her Juilliard audition 13 years ago, when she decided to do a jazzlike improvisation at the end of "Deh vieni, non tardar," Susanna's Act IV aria from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. "You're not supposed to do that,' she says, laughing at the understatement. "They must have thought. This little girl just has no clue. She's got balls, but she has no clue."

Having taken the past year off to raise her own little girl, one-year-old Zoe, McDonald is back, promoting her third release from Nonesuch Records, Happy Songs, making her solo debut at Carnegie Hall, and traveling to Germany to perform on New Year's Eve in Sir Simon Rattle's concert version of Wonderful Town with the Berlin Philharmonic. The fifth-generation Fresno, California, native is also currently filming the new NBC political drama. Mister Sterling, in which she portrays a senator's chief of staff. "I thought it was a great part and that they would never cast me, but then they went ahead and hired an African-American," says McDonald, once again a bit surprised that her talent had transcended a casting director's idea of race. "I feel blessed to be the race that I am. So many times you can look on it as a negative thing:

Oh, gosh, if I were white I'd get more roles. But I think because I've been able to go out and get the roles that I'm right for regardless of my race, that has unfortunately, given the society we live in, been looked upon as this great achievement. My mother always told me that because I was African-American, that was going to be a strike against me in certain sectors of society. So the only thing you could do was to continue to improve yourself. Get the best education you can. And you had to be four to five times better than the next person for you even to be noticed."

Audra McDonald followed her mother's advice. She is four to five times better. And we've only begun to take notice

KEVIN SESSUMS